Long before Amsterdam’s coffee shops, there were hallucinogenic seeds
News and notes about science
In 2011, archaeologists in the Netherlands discovered an ancient pit filled with 86,000 animal bones at a Roman-era farmstead near the city of Utrecht. It fell to Martijn van Haasteren, an archaeozoologist at the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands, to sort through them.
Deep into the cataloging process, van Haasteren was cleaning the mud from yet another bone when something unexpected happened: Hundreds of black specks the size of poppy seeds came pouring out from one end.
The specks turned out to be seeds of black henbane, a potently poisonous member of the nightshade family that can be medicinal or hallucinogenic depending on the dosage. The bone — hollowed out and sealed with a tar plug — was an ancient stash pouch that had kept the seeds safe for about 1,900 years.
This “very special” discovery provides the first definitive evidence that Indigenous people living in such a far-flung Roman province had knowledge of black henbane’s powerful properties, said Maaike Groot, an archaeozoologist at the Free University of Berlin and co-author of a paper published in the journal Antiquity describing the finding.
The plant was mostly used during Roman times as an ointment for pain relief, although some sources also reference smoking its seeds or adding its leaves to wine. It seems its psychedelic effects came to the fore in the Middle Ages, when black henbane became associated “with witches and summoning demons,” said van Haasteren, co-author of the new paper.
Astrid Van Oyen, an archaeologist at Radboud University in Nijmegen, who was not involved in the research, said: “This find shows us a rare glimpse of a possible way in which people navigated and mediated the anxieties, stresses, hopes and aspirations of daily life. Whoever collected all these seeds in this makeshift container did this deliberately and skillfully.”
— Rachel Nuwer
All orcas are classified as a single species. Should they be?
Killer whales are some of the most cosmopolitan creatures on the planet, swimming through every one of the world’s oceans. They patrol the frigid waters near both poles and periodically pop up in the tropics, in locations from western Africa to Hawaii.
Although their habitats and habits vary widely, all killer whales are considered part of a single, global species: Orcinus orca. (Despite their common name, killer whales are actually part of a family of marine mammals known as oceanic dolphins.)
Now, scientists have drawn upon decades of research to suggest that two killer whale populations often observed off the Pacific Coast of the United States and Canada are actually so different from each other — and from other orcas — that they should be considered separate species.
In a paper published Tuesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science, the scientists proposed giving new species designations to two groups of animals: one known as resident killer whales and the other often called Bigg’s killer whales. Although both types live in the eastern North Pacific, they have different diets: the resident orcas eat fish, with a particular predilection for salmon, while the Bigg’s orcas hunt marine mammals such as seals and sea lions.
The proposal documents numerous other behavioral, physical and genetic differences between the two orca populations, which have been evolving away from each other for hundreds of thousands of years, the scientists noted.
“These two types are genetically two of the most distantly related types in the whole world,” said Phillip Morin, a geneticist at the Southwest Fisheries Science Center at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, and an author of the study. “They’re not just behaving differently. They really are on these evolutionary trajectories which we consider to be different species.”
There is no single definition for what qualifies as a species, and the lines between animal populations are often fuzzy. But these sorts of taxonomic distinctions can have implications for conservation, scientists said, allowing experts to make more informed decisions about how to manage different orca populations.
“They very much do face different threats,” said John Ford, an orca expert and scientist emeritus at Fisheries and Oceans Canada.
In recent decades, for instance, rebounding seal and sea lion numbers have helped fuel a population boom for Bigg’s orcas, he said. Resident orcas, on the other hand, have been threatened by dwindling wild salmon stocks.
Ford said that the authors of the new paper made a “very strong case,” pulling together a growing body of evidence that the resident killer whales and Bigg’s killer whales are distinctly different creatures. “It’s these multiple lines of evidence all pointing in the same direction,” he said.
The next step will be to submit the proposal to a committee of taxonomy experts at the Society for Marine Mammalogy, which maintains “the most authoritative list” of species, Morin said.
In recent years, scientific advances have allowed scientists to conduct more sophisticated analyses of the orcas’ genomes. The data suggest that the Bigg’s killer whales branched off from other orcas between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago. The residents, for their part, diverged from other orcas about 100,000 years ago. Genetic and behavioral analyses also suggest that there has been little interbreeding between the Bigg’s orcas and the resident orcas in recent years.
“It’s very compelling evidence to suggest that they represent different species,” said Kim Parsons, a geneticist at NOAA’S Northwest Fisheries Science Center and an author of the study.
Overall, the genomes were different enough that the scientists could predict, with high accuracy, whether a killer whale was a Bigg’s orca or a resident orca based on its DNA alone.
Skull shape is similarly predictive. The Bigg’s orcas have larger, wider skulls, with more deeply curved jaws, than the residents do — traits that might help them wrangle their larger prey. The Bigg’s orcas are also slightly larger than the residents overall, with wider, more pointed dorsal fins and different black-and-white patch patterns.
There are behavioral differences, too. The resident orcas live in large, stable groups, and are known to be chatty, communicating readily as they pursue fish. The Bigg’s killer whales, on the other hand, live in smaller groups and hunt quietly. When they do vocalize, their whistles sound different from those of the residents.
The paper’s authors proposed giving the resident killer whales the new scientific name Orcinus ater. If the Society for Marine Mammalogy accepts the proposal, the scientists said that they planned to consult with Indigenous groups in the Pacific Northwest to select a new common name that reflects the orcas’ cultural importance.
The scientists suggested that the Bigg’s orcas keep that common name, which honors Michael Bigg, an influential orca researcher, but receive the new scientific name Orcinus rectipinnus.
Further analysis might reveal other orca populations that qualify as distinct species, the scientists said.
“There is so much diversity in the oceans that we don’t know about,” Morin said. “Even with animals that are the size of a school bus.”
— Emily Anthes
Ancient ‘Dune’-like sandworm existed far longer than thought
With a head covered in rows of curved spines, ancient Selkirkia worms could easily be confused with the razor-toothed sandworms that inhabit the deserts of Arrakis in “Dune: Part Two.”
During the Cambrian Explosion more than 500 million years ago, these weird worms — which lived inside long, coneshaped tubes — were some of the most common predators on the seafloor.
“If you were a small invertebrate coming across them, it would have been your worst nightmare,” said Karma Nanglu, a paleontologist at Harvard University. “It’s like being engulfed by a conveyor belt of fangs and teeth.”
Thankfully for would-be spice harvesters, these ravenous worms disappeared hundreds of million years ago. But a trove of recently analyzed fossils from Morocco reveals that these formidable predators, measuring only one or two inches long, persisted much longer than previously thought.
In a paper published in the journal Biology Letters, Nanglu’s team described a new species of Selkirkia worm that lived 25 million years after this group of tube-dwellers was thought to have gone extinct.
The newly described tubular worms were discovered when Nanglu and his colleagues sifted through fossils stored in the collection of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. The fossils hail from Morocco’s Fezouata Formation, a deposit dating to the Early Ordovician period, which began about 488 million years ago and spanned nearly 45 million years.
“This new study adds to a growing body of evidence that many members of Cambrian communities continued to thrive during the following Ordovician period and were not quickly replaced as previous evolutionary models might have suggested,” he said.
To Nanglu, the worms’ presence also suggests that sometimes, reality really is stranger than fiction.
“It’s like if the sandworm from ‘Dune’ is building a gigantic house around itself,” Nanglu said. “No matter how wild the thing you see on a screen is, I guarantee that there’s something in nature, even if it’s been extinct for a long time, that’s way wilder.”